


The Dirt Underneath Your Fingernails and the Ground Beneath Your Feet

by torolulu



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Amnesia, Heroes: Volume 5, M/M, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:08:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torolulu/pseuds/torolulu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sylar's attempt to lead a quiet life with the Sullivan Brothers' Carnival is thwarted by his fascination with a mysterious man whom he finds buried on the carnival's grounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dirt Underneath Your Fingernails and the Ground Beneath Your Feet

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate version of Sylar and Mohinder's Season 4 storylines.
> 
> Contains some fairly graphic imagery.

There’s a makeshift cemetery on the carnival’s grounds, about half a mile west of the carnival proper, where they—where we—are able to lay to rest the ones we’ve lost as a family, without the meddling hands and prying eyes of the outside world. Samuel’s blood-brother Joseph lies there, of course, the crown jewel among a handful of erstwhile lost lambs turned beloved kin when they set foot on the very ground in which they’re now buried. When I sift my fingers through the soil on the top of Joseph’s grave I hear Samuel’s voice whispering in my ear: _“Find your way home, brother.”_ But Samuel’s voice is always whispering in my ear, isn’t it?

A few feet away—to avoid, I suppose, tainting the rest of the ground—an officer for the Baltimore Police Department was buried without ceremony after dying for my secrets.

I pull my out-stretched hand back before the dirt blanketing Captain Lubbock’s body stains my fingers.

Further still, hidden in the scant shade provided by a deciduous tree in November, the earth is slightly raised in telltale two by six dimensions. The grave is too far away from the family plot to be one of us, but its placement perpendicular to the middling oak, so that it looms like a headstone, suggests a significance at least above that of “wrong time, wrong place.”

From my crouched position, I place my left hand on the ground behind me for leverage—

 

 _“Find your way home.”_

 

—and stand up to walk to the mystery grave.

My ill-fitting second-hand shirt rides up my back as I slide down the tree to a sitting position, causing my skin to scrape against the rough bark. The pain doesn’t bother me, but I cringe away from the tiny red drops that seep out from the scratches, the sight so uncomfortably familiar.

Something tickles the small of my back and I instinctively reach behind myself and slap it with my hand—

 

 _—and wake in absolute darkness. Every attempt to move my limbs is met with resistance. A surge of panic nearly overwhelms me; followed by the sudden and absolute certainty that I can dig my way out of this husk and emerge as something new._

 _When I’m finally free I fly away for the first time, feeling like I’ve been doing it forever._

 

On my now-bloody palm, an insect’s crooked legs straighten. Its wings uncrumple and it flies away.

I turn my open hand palm-down and graze it across the earth. Behind my eyes a body follows my fingers, dragging with them through the dirt. Specks of soil, scattered by wind and time, give me glimpses of his clothes and skin in squared-millimetre segments, like an impossible jigsaw puzzle; but my mind puts the pieces together easily, automatically— _like cogs in a watch_ —like the ground isn’t putting the image into my mind, but pulling it out.

My hand catches on a twig as a curl of hair once did, unfurling as it’s pulled away with the head to which it’s attached until it bounces off the twig like a spring.

Might a strand have been ripped out?

I pull my hand away as though the ground’s temperature has suddenly shot up.

I’ve wasted too much time here, anyway—there must be work to do, there always is, and it wouldn’t do to repay Samuel’s kindness by brooding in a graveyard.

I stand, dusting myself off, and walk toward the cluster of coloured lights in the distance, staring at them until they appear as bright spots beneath my eyelids, blotting all other images out like ink.

 

*

 

It’s 3:00 AM ( _3:06, don’t pretend you don’t know_ ) when I roll out of my bed—little more than a small shelf protruding out of the wall of the trailer—and walk the well-travelled three feet required to reach the closet-sized bathroom. The door opens inward and I wedge myself between it and the sink, turning the hot water knob as far as it will go. Lukewarm water dribbles meekly over my hands as I rub them together, and disappears down the drain as clear and colourless as when it first left the tap. I scrub for several minutes and return to bed.

I can’t sleep.

This isn’t unusual. Since my trip to the House of Mirrors I haven’t slept more than a few hours a night—three or four at the most. I dream of tearing skulls apart. My victims are too many to count. Their screams wake me and I fear to close my eyes again and see the blood streaming down their faces.

But tonight, for the first time since that day, I don’t see them when I close my eyes. Instead I see the images still seeping through my skin from the dirt underneath my fingernails, a small part of my mind calling to them like a homing beacon, the same part that tells me that the clock above the door is running slow— _but it’s okay, I can fix it, just like he can fix me_.

Searching my mind for distractions, I settle on Lydia. Since my first night here she had been my only refuge when the nightmares became too much to bear alone, and for that I’ll always be grateful, but our last encounter lingers unnervingly in my mind—the intense, painful pressure on my body as it compacted; the deafening sound of my bones and ligaments grinding against each other as they reshaped and rearranged themselves under my suddenly soft skin—and I dismiss any thoughts of seeking her out tonight.

Any physical contact is becoming too dangerous for me. I feel like I could become anyone I touch, the histories of their bodies just flowing into my empty mind through inertia—because there’s nothing there to stop them, no force to repel them or keep them at bay—and creating of my mind and body a mould in which my formless self can swirl around like a gas until I touch someone new, and begin the whole process again.

Perhaps I'm becoming some sort of repository of lives. When the bodies of everyone whom I've touched have died, I'll have a perfect copy of them as they were when we last met stored inside my mind, prepared to be resurrected in my body. I have a vision of myself as the last man on earth in some apocalyptic future, the preserver of humanity, shifting rapidly through the entirety of the human race as I attempt to give each and every individual their time in the light.

Perhaps that would be redemption—I could hunt down as many people as possible, and grant immortality with my touch.

I roll out of bed again and walk to the bathroom, scrub my hands. For a fraction of a second, they’re red and raw. If I were anyone else they’d be bleeding by now, and maybe the images en route to my brain would be diverted, trickling back out through my fingers and down the drain in a swirl of pink, diluted by blood and water; and then I could stop seeing the man from the cemetery for just a second, and be able to think clearly—to stop thinking about how being the man who did what I saw in the House of Mirrors would be worth it if he ever saw that face open-eyed and alive.

At that thought, the skin on my forearms parts down the middle, split edges curling up like hot plastic on either side. It peels until it can be folded down and flattened against the adjacent skin, and remains there, as if held in place by invisible pins.

I hold my vivisected arms above the sink like faucets and watch the blood pour down the drain, waiting, as though for it to run clear. How often has he—have I—been in this very same position? I think of all the blood I saw in the House of Mirrors; I must have spent so much time washing my hands. I stare into the drain as if it were a hypnotist’s coin, but nothing in the red-on-white swirl feels familiar.

I raise my eyes to the mirror. I look like some garish statue ornamenting a fountain. I catch my own gaze—have I ever been able to look myself in the eye while in this position before? What would I have seen?

My body feels as light and hollow as my mind. My vision is starting to blur. Still, I keep my eyes steady on my reflection’s as long as I can, watching as my eyelids droop further and further down, until all I can see— _all_ I can see—is black.

 

*

 

 _I’m at the cemetery again, crouching under the tree. In front of me is a large hole in the earth. My skin and clothes are covered with mud. I’ve been digging the hole myself, I remember, with my own two hands._

 _I continue digging, scooping up mud frantically with my hands and tossing it into a large pile to my left. I can’t stop or slow down. There’s something very important buried here._

 _A dead man lies face down on the ground to my right. The top of his head is missing._

 _“What’s buried here?” he asks._

 _“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s not what I’m here for.”_

 _I turn to the pile of mud beside me—only it’s not mud, I realize, but clay. I put my hands on it, shaping it. I give it arms, legs, a torso and a head._

 _“Who is it?” the dead man asks._

 _His questions are beginning to annoy me, so I cut out his tongue and place it in my creation’s mouth. Then I dip my hand into his skull, rummaging around until my fingers close over something hard. I pull out a small ring._

 _I wipe the blood and brain tissue off on the dead man’s shirt and drop him into the hole in front of me. He lands in a pile with several others, their scalps similarly removed. I don’t recognize any of their faces._

 _I place the ring on my creation’s finger. He opens his eyes, and the hole in the earth closes._

 _“Who is it?” he asks with the dead man’s tongue._

 _“I don’t know,” I answer, running my hands over his nude body._

 _It starts to rain as we make love there under the tree. I remember, then, that I’m made of clay, too; and the rain melts my body until it’s melded to his. “Who is it?” one of us asks, but there’s no one else there to answer._

 

*

 

I come to sprawled across the bathroom floor. It takes me several minutes to realize that the substance caked to my skin is blood rather than clay; by this time I’m awake enough to remember where it came from, and it doesn’t startle me.

I stand up and wash it all off in the sink, ignoring the erection that has carried over from my dream. I try to remember the details of it, but they slip from my mind like wet mud between my fingers whenever I try to grasp them.

 _“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a dream.”_

Lydia would sometimes tell me that when I confessed my frequent nightmares to her. I would pretend to take comfort in her words, though I knew that they were false: that the horrors I had been reliving in my sleep were more than just dreams—that they had actually happened. I thought that was why I should fear them.

But now I know that I was wrong, too. They weren’t just dreams, that much was true—they were _less_ than just dreams, just some images that I’d seen play out on a screen recreated by my empty and unimaginative mind while I slept; and I am no more responsible for them than a mirror is responsible for what it reflects.

 _“It doesn’t matter,”,/i > she had said. _“It’s just a dream.”__

But the only real dream that I’ve had since arriving at this place had been dreamt this morning, lying on my bloody bathroom floor.

The last of the blood trickles down the drain and I return to my bed, not ready to completely give up on rest tonight. It’s late enough in the morning that some birds are already chirping from the homemade birdfeeder hanging on a tree branch just outside my window. Normally they’re loud enough to disturb my sleep, but the ticking of the clock—so frustratingly _wrong_ —has gotten louder, enough to nearly drown them out. And with every movement of the second hand, the images being fed into my brain from the dirt underneath my fingernails become the slightest bit clearer.

I climb out of bed, head out the door, and start walking, glancing occasionally behind my shoulder at the shrinking silhouette of the still and vacant ferris wheel against the blood red sunrise, uncertain whether it was the noise or the visions that ultimately defeated me this morning.

 

*

 

Why am I here?

I sit, once again, alone in the cemetery, with my back to a tree and my hands in the dirt, uncertain of what I’m here to find.

Should I exhume his body, so I can see him, touch him directly?

The traumatic discovery of my shapeshifting ability, all pain and disorientation and unsettling noises, surfaces in my thoughts—no, I can’t touch him. What good would it do, anyway? What is it that I want to find out?

I run my hand idly along the ground beside me, coming upon a patch of dirt darker than its surroundings, and stained slightly red, as with blood.

I pull my hand away, but it’s too late. The blood burrows into the pores of my skin like thousands of tiny parasitic worms ready to crawl up my arm and into my brain. I can feel the images being pulled through my bloodstream as though they were iron filings and my mind a magnet. I panic—I _can’t_ see this, can’t see what I did to this man—and with a slice of telekinesis my contaminated right forearm falls to the ground, amputated at the elbow like a gangrenous limb to keep the infection from spreading.

Blood gushes from the wound, turning the loosely-packed soil below me into mud.

I stumble, lightheaded, and fall on my back. I can see tiny buds popping up here and there all over the headstone tree. Directly above me, a branch that had been snapped off in a windstorm sprouts anew, so quickly that it looks like the tree is being impaled. I stand up and reach unthinkingly with my right arm before it’s even fully formed. My fingers force their way out of my hand, stretching until they meet the branch. It still feels soft, like a sapling, and when I touch it I see nothing but what’s in front of me.

I look down at the ground and see the hand, caked with blood and mud, and feel an overwhelming surge of curiosity. Would it work? I crouch down above it, reach out, and—

 _—slide my hand up his scratchy cheek and tuck his hair around his ear._

 _—run my index finger across his lower lip until he takes it inside his mouth and twirls his tongue around it._

 _—trail my fingers slowly up his inner thigh._

—touch the dead thing that used to be a part of me. Severed, it becomes an object, and I can look at it in a way that was never possible before.

I pull my hand away before the visions become too intense, feeling vaguely disrespectful and embarrassed when I remember where I am. The world has become darker during my mind’s absence. If there’s a storm coming I’ll be needed at the carnival, transporting the less hardy equipment indoors and placing the larger stalls and machines under tarps. I crane my neck to search the sky for grey clouds.

The stark lines sketching the tree have been filled in with green, creating a nearly opaque canopy to shelter me from the early morning sunlight that’s still shining, unthreatened, in the sky behind it.

The leaves rustle in a slight breeze. I reach up and pull one off. There’s a faint red tinge to its veins.

I let it go and it flutters to the ground, settling on the fingertips of my severed right hand.

 

*

 

 _His brain heals first and he regains consciousness immediately, while his body is still in a state of decomposition. For a split second, he can’t move, can’t breathe. His heart isn’t beating. He wonders if he is just a disembodied consciousness—a ghost haunting his body like a house. He wonders if that is what death is._

 _Then his lungs expand as several stones are pushed out of his flesh and pressed firmly into the soft earth above him. He breathes in a lungful of dirt. When he tries to cough it up, it pours into his mouth._

 _He feels his skin crawl back over his body, thinking that it’s bugs. He flails, trying to shake them off. His right arm hits something hard—a tree root, he realizes—and he grasps it like a lifeline, and pulls, trying to drag himself up. He pushes his left arm up and tries to grab another root, to use them as a ladder to climb out of the grave. They start splintering and snapping off in his hands, and he can barely wrap his fingers around those strong enough to withstand the pressure of his grip._

 _Finally he feels the open air on his skin, and he grasps with his right hand one last time. The object in his hand crumbles in a way that his oxygen-starved brain mildly registers as inconsistent with wood, but he holds on with an instinctual determination, even when he hears a muffled shout and feels a series of swift, jerking pulls away from him._

 _The struggle weakens, and then ceases, his consciousness with it._

 

*

 

I’m free—above ground. But I still can’t breathe. I must be choking on dirt lodged in my throat.

I roll onto my stomach and try to climb to my knees. An excruciating pain shoots up from the bottom of my right leg. The scream I make relieves me, letting me know that I can breathe again.

I feel the right side of my body elevated slightly and look down to see my right foot, naked and clean, tucked under my body below a jagged circle of blood ringing my ankle.

I raise my eyes and find myself staring at the ugly, torn edges of my dismembered foot, grazed by a set of bloody, twitching fingers emerging from the earth; the sight brings me back to myself, and I recall the fall that knocked the wind out of me when I tried to yank myself away from the torturous vice gripping my ankle, tearing it off and sending myself tumbling to the ground, the loss of touch severing my connection to the consciousness behind that dirty hand.

I should leave him there. I should bury him down deeper, where the memories of Sylar written in his skin can never reach me and taint my fragile purity. He should be dead anyway, and that he lives now is due only to me—I’d be correcting my mistake.

But my arm is already outstretched, and the earth that was covering his body is hovering above him like an island. He crouches in its shadow, gasping and coughing, spitting chunks of dirt and muddy strands of saliva into a puddle beneath him. “Here,” I say, taking off my shirt and tossing it toward him. He catches it and wipes his eyes, then cleans out his ears and his nose. When he’s finished he drops it on the ground and rolls off to the side. Dirt rains down beside him, offering to the earth my own castoff limbs as an inadequate exchange for what I’ve taken from it.

The sound catches his attention and I see his eyes for the first time. “Sylar?” he says.

“Yes.”

He turns his back to me ( _“I’m not him,” I should have said. “Not anymore.” But the words just won’t come._ ) and grabs hold of a large, sturdy branch attached to the mangled tree squatting behind him. The bizarre sight that had preceded the loss of my foot—this newly blooming tree slipping into the ground as though a sinkhole had magically formed directly underneath it—suddenly makes sense. He pulls the submerged trunk out of the earth like he’s unsheathing a sword and swings it straight at me, hitting me square in the chest.

I fly through the air and land on my back. My imploded torso begins to expand, until something stomps down on it and pops it like a bubble. I open my eyes; my field of vision is consumed by a tree trunk driving toward me. I stop it a few mere centimetres before it collides. A breeze touches my face. I can feel his foot trembling inside my chest cavity as he strains to overcome my telekinesis. Finally, he gives up and backs away. A tide of bone and viscera rise from the centre of my body to fill up the gaping hole in my chest. I wait for the skin to settle on top and then stand to face him.

“Get away from me,” he says, wielding the tree like a baseball bat, ready to beat me to death for the forgotten crimes of somebody he used to know.

“I saved your life,” I say. “Maybe that was a mistake.” I turn my back on him and start to walk away. The history of every grave I pass over flashes before my eyes each time my bare right foot touches the ground. My indignation fades with each footstep, dying entirely when the face of that dead policeman flashes in my mind and I continue past his grave without shedding a single drop of blood—without even considering it. I stop and turn back to the man whom I saved.

His attention is no longer directed at me; he’s turned it to his own chest—partially bared by the holes that riddle his shirt—at which he’s scratching so frantically that he’s broken the skin.

“Stop that.” I lift my hand to forcibly stop his movements, but he does so on his own, suddenly, staring at his chest as if he’s just now noticed the blood dripping out.

I move closer to get a better view of his injury. A smattering of insectile legs poke out like tiny hairs from between the split edges of his skin—it must have healed right over them. I open my hand and they fly like a small swarm into my palm. I close my eyes briefly and see his flesh enveloping their bodies, suffocating them, before they scatter behind me in the breeze.

His eyes follow the little cloud as it floats away, dissolves, and disappears; and remain where they are long after, gazing past me at some distant point on the horizon. I look over my shoulder. Opening time has come and gone at the Sullivan Brothers’ Carnival and the grounds are bustling with activity. I must have been missed at the family breakfast; when the early morning rush dies down, Samuel or Lydia will be sure to come looking for me. I’m not sure whether I want this man here when that happens.

“Are you here to kill Samuel Sullivan?”

“ _What?_ ” His words shock me out of my reverie. “No.” I turn back to face him. “ _No_. Of course not.”

“Really?” He raises his eyebrows slightly and stares at my face as if studying it. “Pity,” he says, turning his face away sharply, as though I’m no longer even worth his time. “I am.”

He doesn’t spare me a second glance as he strides away in the direction of the carnival. I want to follow him, badly, but my feet have become deeply rooted into the ground beneath them, and I just watch him disappear into the horizon, the carnival rides looming like animate mountains over his shrinking figure. From a distance, their collective motion looks interconnected, like the gears of some great machine.

 _Am_ I here to kill Samuel Sullivan?

For all I know, I am.

Then again, for all I know, I’m here to save him from some madman crawled up from the depths of hell to destroy him for god knows what reason. It would have its poetry—he saved _me_ , didn’t he?

I finally drag my eyes away from the horizon. The mess our tussle has made on this little scrap of land is more severe than I had realized. Any mourner looking to pay his respects, or wanderer looking for a moment’s peace and quiet, would see this smashed oak tree lying in ruins a full ten feet away from where it was unearthed and report back to Samuel that our sacred ground had been disturbed; and he would surely discern, from the level of destruction, that it was wrought by one of us, a traitor in the fold. And who among us, aside from he and I, possess that level of power?

Better not to strain the nascent trust I’m forming with my new family.

The top of the tree rises as though hooked by an invisible crane, uprighting it, so that I can drive it into the ground like a nail. I doubt that it will remain vertical for long, with most of its roots destroyed and the midsection of its trunk bashed in—but I can fix it.

I crouch in front of the tree and hold my left hand out away from my body, pointing at my wrist with my right index finger. I take a deep breath—one… two…—and slice it off as quickly as possible— _three!_ —like I’m pulling off a bandage. Blood flows into the base of the tree, and its undamaged roots suck it out of the soil like the tongues of thirsty vampires. The damaged roots rapidly repair themselves, spreading themselves out and grasping the earth around them like tentacles. One of them curves around my severed hand, absconding with it into the earth, adding it to its collection. I watch as my fingers are dragged through the dirt, their nails scraping the ground as though desperate, as though they don’t like where they’re going—as though God has been sending Sylar to Hell one piece at a time, and replacing him with whoever I am. The tiny bones crackle like a fire as they snap, quickly, one after the other—as though the earth needs to chew my hand before it swallows it, burying the memories sealed within deep down in its belly, where they’ll never be able to get me. The last bit of skin disappears under the earth and I feel satisfied, relieved; until images of the memories previously drawn from my body flash before my eyes and I’m struck, suddenly, with a pang of regret so intense that I immediately raise my hand to uproot the tree, undoing all I’d done for one more glimpse—just one, and then I’ll give it back, and the memory of Sylar can be put to rest for good. The roots create a faint web of fissures in the earth as they rise, cracking it like glass, and reminding me from whom I was hiding this mess in the first place. I stop, returning to myself. The tree sinks slightly when I let go, as though to let out a sigh of relief, and settles comfortably back into the ground; a shudder crawls up its trunk as it would a spine, lingering in its leaves, and then it is still.

I turn to lean my back against the tree and rest, my arms wrapped over my bare chest, protecting it from the cool late-autumn air. I can feel my heart beating underneath them—no, not my heart: it seems to come from everywhere, my entire body throbbing under my hands, vibrating with memories rattling their cages and straining against the chains binding them, like a leashed dog desperate to chase a cat. If I leave them be, I’m sure that they’ll burst right out of my skin, leaving me like an empty cell, a frayed length of rope.

I run my fingers over my torso—nothing. Like an eye trying to look at itself.

I take off the rest of my clothes, storing them in a crook of the tree’s braches, and raise my hand. Bits of my body fall like dead leaves, until the story of my life is scattered across the ground before me like pages torn from a book.

The flesh that grows in its place is tender and blissfully ignorant. It comes bundled in a sheet of skin that is as soft as a blanket; and pale, almost virgin white, untouched even by the sun. I feel as I did when Samuel welcomed me, formally, to join his family: cleansed and reborn.

I put my clothes back on and kneel before the strewn remnants of my past as if to make penance, though my flesh no longer knows sin.

Should I touch them all? What would happen?

Would their history work like a key, a trigger, releasing some demon still trapped in my brain to once again possess my body?

Would I let it?

Maybe I would take it and slip my body over it like a perfectly tailored suit, stuff myself with memories like pieces of straw, anything not to be hollow anymore.

I reach out my hand, focusing entirely on the image that I want to pull out, the treasure hidden in this heap of discarded scraps.

 

*

 

“What in God’s name is going on here?”

I snatch my hand away too quickly, like a startled animal. Samuel stands frozen in his tracks a few feet away from me, gaping in disgust. I stare back, saying nothing. How could I explain this to him? He starts talking, sputtering, and I realize he’s angry, but not really at me. I don’t really hear his words. My mind is still replaying the brief snapshots that I was able to pull from my skin, filtering out everything else, and dismissing it as irrelevant, as white noise. A few assorted words manage to get through, digging into my brain like shrapnel while the rest of the barrage falls unnoticed at my feet. Words like “intruder,” and “ghost.” Words like “kill.”

 

 _“Are you here to kill Samuel Sullivan?”_

 _“No. No, of course not.”_

 _“Pity. I am.”_

 

And I just let him go—let him march off alone into a battle against the very ground beneath his feet, knowing he didn’t stand a chance.

“Did you kill Mohinder Suresh?” I blurt out. I know his name the way I know the inside of a watch.

“What?” he asks, my question surely just as out of the blue as Mohinder’s first question to me. I wait for the “No,” the “Of course not.”

“Yes,” he says. “I did.”

A welcome tremor follows his words, shuddering through my body like a thrill of hope, until I remember to whom I’m speaking.

Samuel and I raise our hands in unison. The ground splits between my feet, pulls itself apart; but skin and bone separates faster than dirt and rock, and Samuel falls down dead long before I’m swallowed whole. The earth stills, languid and disinterested now, without a master to command it.

But not for long.

I could heal him. I could open up a vein and drip my blood onto his exposed brain, where his forehead used to be, anointing him, baptising him, saving us both by doing so.

Or I could do something else.

I approach his body slowly, warily, unsure of what I’m going to do. Before I can decide, I hear a loud bang, and a bullet whizzes past my head, taking a chunk out of my right ear. I turn around just in time to stop the next one from hitting me in the back; its tip scrapes down my outstretched hand as I drop it on the ground. Two more shots are fired, both stopping short by several feet, before the gunman finally gives up.

“Is this why you brought me back? You found out about Samuel’s power?” He tosses the gun aside. He must have snuck into one of the trailers and stolen it—these bullets were meant for Samuel. “You should have saved yourself the trouble. I won’t tell you anything.”

“I didn’t kill him for his power,” I say. “He said he’d killed you.”

“He did.”

Understanding washes over me, absolving me, quelling fears that I hadn’t realized I had: _It wasn’t me._ I didn’t put him in the ground.

“If you don’t want his power,” he says, picking the gun up from the ground, “prove it.”

He approaches me, gun in hand, and I raise my hand defensively. He rolls his eyes as he walks right past me and points it at Samuel’s head. I avert my eyes and brace myself for the blast.

I start when I feel his hand touching mine. He pulls it from my side and pries open my clenched fist, one finger at a time, surprising me by always stopping before the bone snaps. He presses the gun into my hand, closing my fingers around it, and closing his fingers around mine. Pressing close to me, he points the gun back to Samuel’s head. I can feel his breath against my ear. “Prove it,” he says, moving away, leaving the gun in my hands.

I fire. Mohinder winces but doesn’t look away. I fire again. Samuel’s brain is utterly destroyed. I pull the trigger a third and fourth time; the gun clicks ineffectually. Mohinder places his hand on mine, gently lowering the gun for me. “We should bury him,” he says.

 

*

 

Samuel is buried next to his brother, in that soil already infused with his voice; the ghosts of his own words of mourning sufficing for the occasion, as we had none to offer ourselves.

 _“Find you way home,”_ he tells himself, though the soil, through me.

My own remains fill the vacancy left under the tree. They’d horrified Mohinder when he had first noticed them, thinking I’d slaughtered an innocent, perhaps someone who tried to stand between me and Samuel. He refused to be convinced otherwise until I located a scrap of pared skin among the mess and placed it like a puzzle piece over my arm, revealing a pattern of moles identical to the one scattered across the living tissue beneath it.

He knew, then, that I was telling him the truth—not just about the body, but about everything: the loss of memory, of identity; the horror I’d felt at discovering who I’d been in the past; the desire to erase it, to shed my old self like a snake sheds its skin. In that moment I’d thought that I had seen genuine empathy flash across his features, where there had previously been only disdain, as if his own past also held horrors of which he can’t truly believe himself capable.

Now I find myself vindicated, as the memories of those horrors seep into my skin from his, filling me with strength, like an elixir. I run my hands over his body, and see it doused with a red liquid; like holy water it drives from his body the demon that must have made him do those terrible things. I try to tell him that we’re the same, that there must have been a demon in my memories, affecting my brain like a chemical, like a faulty serum. He laughs at this. “You mean my father?” he says, and his touch becomes rougher.

 _“You mean my father?”_

 _“My father, who you murdered.”_

 _“You are the man who murdered my father.”_

Mohinder’s lips whisper these past-formed phrases against mine, like secrets that they don’t want him to hear, his tongue writing them with broad strokes across the roof of my mouth. He turns his face away and my skin rises in a rash of goosebumps; whether from his breath on my skin or the chill air of a morgue suddenly surrounding me, I don’t know.

“Yes, that’s him,” his lips speak, silently, into my ear. I feel dead flesh under my fingertips, the hands now holding me down in the dirt reaching out to touch his father’s face one last time, and it’s shockingly cold compared to the warm body above me.

“It wasn’t really me,” I say, taking his face between my hands. “You know that, right? _These_ hands didn’t kill your father.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. He grabs my hands and presses them above my head, scraping our knuckles against the bark of the tree that stands above us like a headboard. He squeezes until the bones start to snap, and it occurs to me that, on some level, he wants me to be Sylar, that he wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t think that I was; just like he wouldn’t be doing this if he couldn’t tell himself that I’m not Sylar, not really, not anymore.

“Tell me your name,” he says, his grip unrelenting. “Say it.”

I lift my hips, pressing myself against him in an effort distract him, to lead him away from this path.

He squeezes harder. My bones grind together like rusty gears. “I want to hear you say it.”

My lips press tightly together. I raise my head up off the ground, trying to kiss him with my closed mouth, to make him stop talking; but he turns my plan against me, his lips still forming the words at me from some distant past, even while his teeth and tongue are occupied with the opening of mine, and plundering inside for answers.

Finally, I free myself, forcing his hands from me with my mind. I flip him on to his back and crawl over top of him. My hands drift over his skin, touching him everywhere; and in my mind they’re trailed by a second, identical set, following precisely the same pattern. Everywhere I touch is marked like a map—a useless map that I’m not shown until I reach my destination, coincidentally by the same route taken by the cartographer.

 _“Zane,”_ says the Mohinder in my mind.

“Sylar,” says the one below me.

My hands tense up at the name and I bite his neck angrily, watching the scene reflected in my mind’s eye a second later, like a funhouse mirror that can magically change our filthy and improper surroundings into the more appropriate setting of a cozy motel room.

“Yes,” he says, laughing again. “That’s right.” I bite him again, reaching between his legs, but he tosses me off of him and into the dirt. He holds me down, shoving my legs up and apart, manhandling me. His hands feel like they’re rearranging my bones, moulding my flesh, giving me a shape. I close my eyes when he finally enters me, seeing it happen in another life, like a ghost haunting that cheap little motel. I can feel what he felt then, can feel the exquisite pressure of myself around my cock, and it keeps me from breaking into a million pieces from the pain of him inside me.

He kisses me, or I kiss him—I can’t tell, having momentarily lost track of whether my eyes are closed or open. His tongue enters my mouth and it feels like too much, too much of him inside me—like he’s trying to invade me, trying fill me up so full that I’m forced out of my own body. I bite his lip, and he pulls away, thrusting harder. I press his head against my neck, fisting my hand in his hair. I close my eyes to watch myself do the same thing in another time, another place.

“Tell me your name,” he says again, through clenched teeth against my neck, and I know that he’s close.

“Sylar,” I say, against his ear. “Sylar.”

“Sylar,” he repeats, and he comes, trembling, inside of me.

I hold him close in the aftermath. He murmurs something against my neck, but my mind is too far away to hear it, fixated on some point on the eastern horizon: a place where people like me are welcomed like family, all our sins forgotten; and where nobody even bothers to lock their doors at night, children safe in the knowledge that their father will always be there to protect them from the monsters.


End file.
